Customer Success Manager

Customer Customer success Retention Scenario-based

A structured Customer Success Manager hiring process built around retention scenarios and a mock QBR, for finding CSMs who own net revenue retention.

Why this works:

Asking for book-of-business metrics up front separates revenue owners from friendly firefighters
Churn-save, onboarding, and renewal scenarios show how a candidate actually runs a book, not how they interview
A mock QBR is the CS equivalent of asking an engineer to write code instead of describing it
Sales, CS, and the hiring manager score against one shared rubric, so the warm-but-flat candidate can’t slip through

Best for: SaaS startups hiring a CSM to own renewals, NRR, and expansion for a defined book of accounts
Timeline: ~2 weeks
Candidate effort: 3-4 hours

Process stages

This template includes 6 stages that candidates move through:

Application

Submit Application

Tell us about the book of business you own today: how many accounts, what segment, and the retention numbers you were measured on.

Retention Scenarios

Questionnaire

Three written scenarios you can complete at your own pace. We’re reading for how you prioritize health signals, sequence a plan, and frame the commercial case, not for polish.

3 questions

Scenario Review

Team Review

Your Sales lead, CS lead, and hiring manager each score your scenarios independently against a shared rubric before comparing notes.

Mock QBR

Interview

We’ll send you account data ahead of time. You’ll present a 20-minute quarterly business review as if we were your customer, then we’ll dig into your portfolio: the metrics you owned, an expansion you built the case for, and what owning NRR here would mean in your first 90 days.

60 min

References

Reference Check

We’ll reach out to two references for a brief conversation about retention and expansion outcomes you owned together.

Offer

We’ll send an offer with base and variable spelled out separately, tied to a retention target you can actually influence.

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